New Painting with Requested Demo

[byroncallas]

Hello Gang.

I’ve received several PM’s the last couple of weeks asking how I build paintings. I did this painting to illustrate one way I commonly work. It’s a simple painting to illustrate a typical approach.

I approach this painting pretty much the same way I would for a “real” media painting, starting with a base layer and then continually building on top of it a layer at a time in a consecutive and methodical order. The illustration of 14 steps below for this painting are pretty typical for me and I think easy to follow.

Steps 1 through 9 (the first nine images): Working on an initial idea, I use the AR bump lighting paints (glitter, oil brush and tube paint) with the pallet knife and eraser to build a textured base layer. The layer is the support form for giving various types of dimension to what will become the final painting. The select tool is helpful here for creating isolated areas for manipulating paint when building forms and texture. I’ve used the ink pen to lay bold opaque areas of color over the bump paints which will provide a base for glazing tints in the next steps. The ink pen is good for this because it reacts with the textured paint as if it is dry. It conforms to the forms for beautiful effects in both the under- and over-painting.

Step 10 (Image 10) is the first step in building the final design which was the original idea for the painting. This painting has stuck pretty close to the original idea. The ink pen is used to lay transparent “glazes” to build a color scheme that (hopefully) contributes to visual depth and interest, and that will invite visual exploration. (In other paintings many different things can be done with all the other various AR tools.)

Step 11 I begin to lay the design pattern at the bottom of the painting on top of what is already developed. I use the ink pen to start blocking out this new visual component.

By Step 12, I am using a combination of opaque and transparent applications of the ink pen to lay in the narrow, vertical straight lines one line at a time, constantly changing the pen size, aspect ratio, ink color and transparency. It might look complicated but this goes pretty fast and is a simple technique.

In Step 13 I added a new textured visual element (the textured circle) to provide a focal point that is (hopefully) a jumping off point for exploring the other visual elements of the painting. It is built with glitter, tube paint, pallet knife and eraser, glazed with the ink pen. Meanwhile I continue to refine the graphic elements at the bottom of the painting using the ink pen.

Step 14 is refinement and clean up. I used the pallet knife to somewhat reshape some of the base texture primarily around the textured circle, and to get rid of errant pixels. I used the airbrush to provide some atmosphere, lighting subtlety, and highlights at various points. It’s the final painting.

Many of my paintings have considerably more complex “builds”, but this is a typical ordering. For those who were interested I hope it provides some useful pointers. Questions or feedback just give a yell. Comments and feedback are welcomed.